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Alek Petty

Postdoctoral associate, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center

Expertise: Polar sea ice variability: modeling, remote sensing, prediction

Forbes article accurately describes research on Atlantic ocean circulation weakening, but headline goes farther

“This is an accurate, concise summary of the slowdown of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) and its possible future states. There are a couple of minor issues: specifically, one of the links goes to an irrelevant article, and it would be useful to have a couple more citations to the scientific literature. The title is possibly a little overstated; I might instead say that the AMOC is at risk of collapsing in a warming world.”

The Daily Wire makes wild claims about climate change based on no evidence

“The article contains little to no rational treatment of observational data, but relies on heavily biased secondhand interpretation… Even the title is based on a lie. There is no ‘study’ that finds static temperatures for 19-years. This article is based on a newspaper article that makes this false statement based in turn on a blog post…”

The Telegraph publishes false information about Arctic climate

“This article suffers from a common error in reasoning. The author focuses on individual “snapshots” of the state of the climate while ignoring the long-term trends. Those trends occur over many decades and must be observed/considered over those time scales.”

Analysis of "The big melt: Global sea ice at record low"

The five scientists who reviewed the article concluded that it is accurate. It properly conveys the core facts about global sea ice extent and the attribution of continuing sea ice loss to human-induced warming of the climate—primarily in the Arctic, as the low sea ice extent around Antarctica this year has not yet been clearly connected to climate change.